Email Lists - Email Marketing Run Amok? (It Can Be Bad For Your Business)
Even if you don't have any interest in Internet marketing and don't have a business (perhaps you don't even understand what that's), if you have e-mail, you've experienced the more ugly side of email marketing. You've probably even seen the ads for email address lists that offer thousands-or even millions-of email addresses for pocket change. Did you ever wonder how anyone could come up with all these addresses?
You can be certain of one thing: in the event the price is cheap, these aren't opt-in lists. Instead, these enormous lists are loaded with “harvested” email addresses. They are comparable to your list of street addresses taken from your telephone book.
Mainly, the addresses are picked from web logs, student or membership lists, newsgroups, message boards, forums, along with other locations where folks gather to innocently swap information. They do not understand their addresses sold on the open market and are being gathered up. And they surely didn't request to have their inboxes polluted with spam.
Picking email addresses is legal. But it is broadly considered unethical. You will not go to jail or pay a fine. But you might hurt your company, possibly irreparably. The possible outcomes for breaking the unwritten rule about no email harvesting range to having your company, from losing your ISP blacklisted to losing your domain.